Black hole absorption cross-sections and the anti-de Sitter-conformal field theory correspondence

Recent work has uncovered a correspondence between theories in anti-de Sitter space, and those on its boundary. This has important implications for black holes in string theory which have near-horizon AdS geometries. Using the effective coupling to the boundary conformal field theory, I compute the low-energy, s-wave absorption cross-sections for a minimally coupled scalar in the near-extremal four- and five-dimensional black holes. The results agree precisely with semi-classical gravity calculations. Agreement for fixed scalars, and for the BTZ black hole, is also found.